Archetypal Organism is my attempt to harmonize the psychology of C.G. Jung – archetypal psychology – with the metaphysics of A.N. Whitehead – philosophy of organism.
I will approach the subject from both a devotional angle, siding with Jung’s therapeutic bias, and from a metaphysical angle, honoring Whiteheads’ rationalist bias. In other words, Whitehead gives us a cosmological context in which we can ground what we might consider Jung’s more confessional approach – our daily devotion.
These biases are clearly seen in such aphorisms as:
“The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history.” A.N. Whitehead
“In every adult there lurks a child – an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.” Carl Jung
The two ways of knowing, the mythical (narrative) and the rational (logic), may be considered the two poles of the spectrum of experience. Jung, the physician and psychiatrist, adopts the mythical approach, full of soul and animating ideas. But Jung’s intuitions hang as if in mid-air without any metaphysical support. Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, tends toward the rationalist pole and gives us a metaphysical grounding explicitly addressing the questions of God, Creativity and feeling (prehension). These two giants of the twentieth century, all but ignored by the academic orthodoxy, provide both a practical (Jung) and a theoretical (Whitehead) foundation for living an enchanted life.
Unfortunately, myth has become synonymous with untruth. However, everything unknowable, because it cannot be directly observed, is necessarily mythical or understood through metaphor. This applies to atoms as much as to Eve. Science works with idealized models that are known to be only true enough – they allow scientists to relate to complex data sets as if they were a knowable unified entity. The model of the atom with electrons orbiting the nucleus is best considered a transformational fiction, as is the model of the universe I call the Archetypal Organism.
The best way to re-infuse the sense of implicit truth back into myth may be to imagine it as transformational fiction. What is true about myth, poetry, and narrative accounts in general, is that they transform. Myth transforms our relation to the unknown from that of utter confusion into a metaphorical or conceptual image. It is this image to which we can take up a position. This relation changes our experience of the world we inhabit, and this new experience of the world we inhabit may transform us.
The Archetypal Organism, my image of the entire universe, when “fully imagined as a living being other than myself, becomes a guide with a soul having its own” reality. Jung tells us, “Psychological existence is subjective in so far as an idea occurs in only one individual. But it is objective in so far as it is established by a society – by a consensus gentium.” Compare the traditional analog of this quote in a more literalized form: “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in their midst.”
Imagination is our creative tool par excellence, able to produce novel objective existence out of pure psychic energy, as science and technology have amply demonstrated. So, when there is a consensus, however small, about the Archetypal Organism, or a similar image of the living cosmos, its objective psychological existence may be a result. I believe this image, the union of the ideas of these two great men, has the potential to transform the experience we have of the Cosmos. This accords with Whitehead’s most basic metaphysical principle: “The many become one, and are increased by one.”
In my opinion this blog is best characterized as poetry – a contemporary speculative narrative. Its sole appeal is to intuition, coherence and beauty. As such, it allows us to adopt a provisional attitude toward it, following Whitehead’s admonition, “Seek simplicity, and doubt it”. It can only be judged by whether or not it changes the world we experience for the better. Its emphasis is on transformational experience rather than intellectual abstraction. Like the raft we use to cross a river, abstractions and myths are the vehicles we can leave behind once we reach the other side, but without which we can’t continue the journey. Nietzsche shows us the proper attitude when he says, “Even now my entire philosophy wavers after just an hour of friendly conversation with complete strangers. It strikes me as so foolish at insisting on being right at the expense of love.”
It is in this spirit that I resonate with Montaigne when he tells us, “All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.”
DISCLAIMER
This blog is entirely a personal reflection on experiences I have had while reading and thinking about the writings of two fallible geniuses. Nothing contained herein should be taken as psychological or theological guidance.